Playwright's Podcast

Amir Gudarzi is a writer born in Tehran, Iran, in 1986. Due to censorship his plays were only shown in private circles. And since 2009, Amir has lived in involuntary exile in Vienna, Austria.

Zinnie Harris has been a presence in the new writing scenes of her home country of Scotland and in London alike. In that time, no writer has drawn so fully and with such imagination from the classical cannon of dramatic literature. Harris's plays are creatures steeped in their dramatic past. Classical heritage sits in her own original work as freshly as in those adaptations.

Sabrina Ali is a British Somali writer and actor, who is driven by a passion for sharing authentic and representative stories. Sabrina’s most recent play, Dugsi Dayz, played at Edinburgh Fringe 2023, returned to the New Diorama last year and will play in the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs this Spring.

Over the last decade, Stef Smith has become one of the UK’s most urgent theatre makers. She is restless, not just in the face of her world’s deep grained political and economic injustices of the highest order but also in the capacity for conventional theatre forms to properly explore those injustices. It is this restlessness that has driven and defined one of the most compelling theatrical biographies of the decade.

Khawla Ibraheem is a playwright, actor and director based in the Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. She is a regular at many theatres in Palestine and outside of Palestine she has collaborated with many theatres and institutions, including as a fellow at the McDowell, and as an artist in residence at the Sundance Theatre Lab. Khawla's one-woman play, A Knock on the Roof, opens at the Royal Court later this month.